I think
every careful student of that tremendous conflict is ready to say
to-day that, if the North and South had been acquainted with each other,
known each other as they know each other now, the war would have been
impossible. We need to know other men. As you go back, you find curious
traditions illustrating this ignorance of different nations and
different peoples of each other. Plato, for example, taught it as a
virtue that the Athenians should hate all other peoples except the
Greeks and all other Greek cities except Athens; and they spoke of the
outside nations that did not speak Greek as barbarians, people who
could not talk, people who, when they essayed to speak, said, "Ba, ba,"
misusing words and expressions. They had traditions of men who carried
their heads under their arms, who had only one eye, which was in the
middle of their forehead, all sorts of monstrosities in human shape,
antagonistic to the rest of mankind.
Even in modern times those ignorances, misconceptions, and prejudices
are far from being outgrown. Lord Nelson counted it as a virtue in an
Englishman that he should hate a Frenchman as he did the devil. How
many people are there to- day who look with an unprejudiced eye upon a
foreigner?
The things, then, that keep nations apart are ignorance. Then there is
the lack of sympathy. You will find people walking side by side here in
our streets, people in the same family, who find it impossible to
understand each other.
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